Integrating QR codes and Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate the sharing of learning experiences on field trips

L H Chan and Vincent W L Tam
University of Hong Kong
Hong Kong SAR, China

Michael K M Lui
Education Bureau
Hong Kong SAR, China

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Declaimer: This is a revised version that supersedes the printed version.

Each year, schools organize many visits to natural education centres, exhibition centres and museums for students to acquire and share their learning experiences outside the classroom. Similarly, tertiary institutions organize site visits or overseas trips for students to learn from actual industrial experience. In the past, the course instructors or tour guides in various exhibition centres had to prepare and hand out many notes for students about the background of different exhibits; and after each visit, students had to memorize and record all the information on exhibits in their logbooks and submit reports. Even with the aid of hand-held devices, the process of writing up a report is still inconvenient, time-consuming and tedious as the students spend most of their energy and time on recalling all the facts without much opportunity to share their valuable learning experiences or exchange ideas with one another after the visits.

In recent years, some organizations, including several overseas universities, are using quick response (QR) codes for users to express their opinions through online surveys or voting. Interestingly, a pilot mobile learning project initiated and owned by EDB and hosted at the Hong Kong Education City advocates the use of QR code and its decoder to allow primary school students to access quickly useful information about 100 popular plants in Hong Kong through GPRS-enabled mobile phones with built-in cameras. In this pilot project, each exhibit is assigned a unique QR code from which students can use the pre-installed QR decoder in the mobile phones provided to decode it. The URLs decoded from the QR code provide a link to the web-page concerned to retrieve relevant information about the exhibits. In this project, we propose the integration of QR codes with Web 2.0 technologies, specifically a community-based (blog-like) discussion forum, to promote the sharing of learning experiences on field trips. Our system is easy to use and therefore suitable for primary to tertiary students; and, more important, it provides many useful functions for students in the same or different groups to share what they have learned, or give feedback on other groups’ reports for peer review or enhancement. In this way, the system provides a ubiquitous learning platform to increase interactivity among different groups/students who actively share their learning experiences and also ‘learn from peers’ at the same time. Furthermore, sophisticated searching functions are provided for students to search others’ experiences (if permission is granted) for any common exhibit located in the paths they have visited. A preliminary evaluation has been conducted, with some encouraging feedback; and a more rigorous evaluation is planned for around October 2009 which will investigate, for example, the integration into our system of relevant materials such as multimedia files or pointers to online databases, and will examine closely the pedagogical changes brought about by our integrated system for mobile learning.